In a liquid crystal display device in a mode of electrically controlled birefringence (ECB) or the like, liquid crystal molecules are undesirably influenced by a lateral electric field due to a relationship between the polarities of adjacent pixels and the rubbing direction of an alignment film, and disclination of the alignment of the liquid crystal molecules occurs in an area in part. The disclination needs to be eliminated since it causes various display failures such as image lag, blurring, reduction in a contrast ratio and the like when an image is displayed.
Use of a light-shielding film or the like to block the light on a portion where the disclination occurs is the most dependable method, but a problem arises in that an area of an opening portion which contributes to the display is reduced as the light-shielding film is extended. Rubbing a pixel polarity in a direction in which no disclination occurs, applying a line-inversion drive scheme, and the other methods for dealing with this problem are also well known.
In a reflective liquid crystal display device, for example, the reflectivity and the contrast ratio (CR) are varied according to the azimuth of observation. Even if the rubbing direction is set under conditions under which the optical properties such as reflectivity and contrast ratio are optimized, disclination occurs because of the influence of the lateral electric field between adjacent pixels having different polarities when the column-inversion drive scheme is applied. For this reason, it is desirable to use the line-inversion drive scheme to suppress the occurrence of the disclination. However, the use of the line-inversion drive scheme of supplying video images having their polarities inverted in each one or more pixel lines for the same signal line has a problem in that the energy consumption is increased in comparison with the use of the column-inversion drive scheme of supplying video signals of the same polarity to the same signal line in one frame period.